Several years ago when we introduced our change process, the concept of an 'Functional CAB' was added into our guiding principles doco. The idea is that the functional teams will meet on a regular basis to discuss the changes that impact their areas and provide any pre-approvals required by our change process. They would discuss the technical aspects of the work as well as having regular participation from the customer to ensure they too agree to the work, risk and scheduling. Upon the completion of the meeting, the changes would then come to the official CAB for the final approval to be implemented into the production environment.

Since this concept was introduced, we have undergone numerous organizational changes and many management changes. The new management is highly agitated at the number of CAB meetings that we have globally (one per region plus a global one). We have managed to combine some CAB meetings where feasable which seems to thus far be working fine. The functional CAB meetings however are the latest target and they are openly displeased with their existance.

I guess my question to everyone here is does your organization utilize a similar concept to our functional CAB meetings and if so, how are they organized and run? Are the inputs/outputs similar in concept to what I've described? I had yet another meeting to explain to my management this week for nearly 30 minutes that while this concept is not ITIL, it is still best practice and feel our organization has no authority to tell the ops teams they cannot meet to discuss changes and if we did; would be highly detrimental to the success of the process.

I'm open to all the feedback or ideas you guys have on how to work this one out.

a) they are presumably time consuming and take away from all that fun coding we could be doing

b) we know that the code we write or wires we hook up or whatever else will never break, so why bother? I mean, I installed that same server 20 times in the past, so what can possibly go wrong on the 21st try?

One thing I also noticed about "functional" CABs is that right questions are never asked unless a person with ITSM knowledge (or at least an inkling of such) is present. The silo culture and thinking only about MY areas is so so so hard to break through.

John I always enjoy reading your responses. To answer your question, it's mostly because they see the meetings as a waste of time and what better way to free up time than to cut out meetings. This philosophy has lead us down the path of virtualizing several of the CAB meetings which does seem to work well. We still meet semi-regularly on a face to face basis but 95% of the CAB work is done via virtual methods. This has saved the participants a bit of time although it does put more on the change manager to get things ready and rolling.

Beyond this, I really have no idea why they are against the meetings. I can tell you that the directives are coming from those who have little to no ITSM/ITIL knowledge.

My workplace has had the opposite problem. There is a CAB for Infrastructure (aka Ops, Hardware) that until recently was what I like to call a Dead Zone.
It had become a technical forum, with a very low level of detail discussed. One result is that the people authorised to make the go / no-go decisions stopped attending. A meeting that should have lasted 30 minutes was dragging over an hour.

But regarding your issue, what if you called it a team meeting instead of a CAB?_________________DYbeach
ITIL V3 Release, Control & Validation,
ITIL V3 Operation SUpport & Analysis
PMI CAPM (R)

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." George Orwell

It sounds like your organization needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. I'd add to the dialogue discussions about maturity and doing what is right for the customers.

As the organization increases in complexity from being the best at one service to several services. WIth complexity and variation, brittleness is introduced into your organization. How your organization acts in the future is the level of sophistication in place.

It sounds like your company has regressed or chooses to remain as cowboys. Often leaders in this position are a benevolent controller managing functional maintaining the lights applications. These individuals are definitely operationally focused

The discussion to be had is to bring the leadership up a level to organizers. Organizers are enterprise oriented, focused on "doing the right thing". These leaders are concerned about portfolio of applications and building upon the infrastructure. Here it is easier to see the need and value of the CAB.

Hope this helps,
Elyse_________________Collaboration is the key to success!

Thanks to EVERYONE for the excellent feedback on this topic. I hope you don't mind but I used little comments from each of you into my emails and conversations with management. After much debate (and lots of brow beating on my side) we were able to get them to agree to the need of these meetings. As a side affect, our group is accountable for the overall success of them but the important part is that they will move forward as an authorized piece of the process.

Again thank you as always for your feedback and guidance to help us towards our illusive maturity level